


You're Making Me Shake

by threepwillow



Category: Glee
Genre: AU, Glee Live Tour is semi-canon?, M/M, Online Romance, Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-09
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-04-03 16:52:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4108105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threepwillow/pseuds/threepwillow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blaine's Dumb Friend Chandler opens his eyes to the world of Tumblr. It takes Tumblr user kurtrageous to open his eyes to the whole damn world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're Making Me Shake

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for LJ's [beyond_dapper](http://beyond-dapper.livejournal.com) mini-hiatus exchange in November 2012, for [switch842](http://switch842.livejournal.com). The prompt was "AU where Kurt & Blaine meet over some sort of social network site (twitter or tumblr, etc)" and I clearly took that and ran with it! As part of the fic, I did actually create both jumpupbubbleup and kurtrageous as actual blogs, and I still update them sporadically when I come across things I think the boys would like, so you can check that out if you like, as well. :)

**I. #about me**  
  
It's Blaine's Dumb Friend Chandler that finally persuades him into creating a Tumblr account.  
  
Blaine's always maintained a kind of active presence online - but with the emphasis on "kind of." It's mostly been occasional Facebook and Twitter updates and a small but dedicated role in a couple of smaller forums designed to help teens that are struggling with coming out and other LGBT issues. Blaine's prided himself on the latter extraordinarily; that's actually where he met his Dumb Friend Chandler in the first place, though since he moved to New York he and Chandler have connected a bunch "IRL" too. (Blaine should really stop calling him his Dumb Friend Chandler, but the title just seems to have stuck. Blaine loves Chandler, but he really can be so  _dumb_. Endearingly so, but still.)  
  
Chandler, meanwhile,  _adores_  Tumblr. Chandler  _adores_  quite a number of things, and a disconcertingly high percentage of those things are connected to his ever-present smartphone. He tweets and tumbls and Facebooks almost constantly, and he's got a Pinterest and two separate Instagram accounts, one of which is dedicated solely to pictures of himself and the food he is about to eat. He tells Blaine that Blaine simply  _must_  create a Tumblr account, that he's living in the past and has no idea what he's missing, and so eventually rather than put up a fight with his somewhat exhausting pal, Blaine caves. He signs up with his personal email to make sure his professional school account doesn't get cluttered with weird stuff, and picks a lyric from his favorite Roxy Music song as his username because it's got less of a chance of being taken already, and pokes at one of the free generic layouts until it looks kind of nice, and there you have it:  
  
Blaine Anderson is on Tumblr.  
  
And, just like his Dumb Friend Chandler pretty much warned him by example, he gets kind of addicted.

\---

At first, because he doesn't really know anyone or anything else, Chandler's the only person Blaine is following. Although with the sheer volume of his posts, and the frequency with which his userpic and URL change - always some variant of a pun off his last name, either "feeling" into "kiehling" or "killing" into "kiehling," and oh how upset he'd been when he found out "yourekiehlingmesmalls" was being hoarded (though for Halloween, he does switch it up a bit to "mschanandlerkohl" and change his icon to Matthew Perry from Friends) - it really does feel like he's following two or three people, at least. But there's only so long Blaine can take the cutesy selfies of Chandler and his boyfriend, gifs of the white and purple My Little Pony, and endless Polyvore designs without a little bit of a break, so he cautiously ventures into one of the parts of Tumblr he finds most frightening - "the tags." 

  
Fortunately for Blaine, it ends up not being so bad. The Katy Perry tag is wonderful and has so many cute pictures of her - there's a blog solely for pictures of her with little kids and animals, which he follows almost instantly - and the Brooks Brothers tag is riddled with some weird kids called the Janoskians but he still manages to strike gold here and there. Slowly but surely he finds other "real people," too, and that's the part that Blaine loves the most - that friendship stretching across miles, and knowing that he can be there for people who may not have found anyone in their immediate physical vicinity who'll care about them that much.  
  
Blaine has been that person. It's not exactly a barrel of fun.  
  
He's been an active blogger for about two months now, and as he lolls on his stomach across his dorm room bed, mindlessly tumbling as a procrastination method for a theatre history paper he really,  _really_  doesn't want to write, it occurs to Blaine that this is probably exactly how one is meant to use Tumblr. He posts a cool fanart he found of Cyclops and Wolverine and tags it with  _#me and Sam :(_  and then clicks back to his dashboard proper, and sure enough, the top post on his dash is from his Dumb Friend Chandler. It's a video, the thumbnail just a blurry black screen with some people on it that look a fair distance away. He reads Chandler's commentary first and is surprised to see that all it says is   
  
**ohwhatakiehling:**

> Blainers!!!!

  
Curious, Blaine studies on it further. The original poster is a user with the URL "kurtrageous" - it's not a user Blaine has ever seen around, he doesn't even think Chandler has reblogged from them before - and the text of his post says  _I can't believe I found this on YouTube. **YouTube!**  Who other than my dad was taking video of this?!_ but then in another paragraph by itself just the two words  _Sigh... Nostalgia._  
  
Now Blaine's even  _more_  curious. So finally, he clicks "play" on the embedded video, and the sharp laugh and "oh my GOD" is out of his throat before he can stop himself.  
  
Who  _was_  taking video of this and putting it on YouTube? Who on Earth cared that much about the  _American National High School Show Choir Concert TOUR!_ , especially from almost four years ago? He remembers this venue, remembers how ridiculous it was to be playing in someplace so  _large_  when there was barely anyone in the seats - it had by far been the largest place they'd played on the piddly 8-stop tour. And just like that, the nostalgia is washing over him: the memory-ingrained choreography for Raise Your Glass that he could probably still do in his sleep till this day, his improv'd duets with Nick or Jon backstage that he was so sad could never feature in the actual concert lineup, that all-girls' school that had been on the tour with them whose members had probably slept with fifty percent of the Warblers and vice-versa, how sad he'd been that Wes and David and the other seniors couldn't come with them because of college, his penpal Sam from that Louisiana choir who had fallen out of touch since they started college and it was breaking Blaine's hea--  
  
Wait. Tumblr user kurtrageous said "nostalgia" too. Snapping back to reality, Blaine actually manages to focus on the video before him - and it's  _of_  that Louisiana choir. It's the big group number they did to Don't Stop Believin', which had easily been the highlight of the show according to all the newspaper coverage the tour got (though Blaine's Teenage Dream earned a fair amount of praise also, he remembers smugly); it isn't the whole song, but it's enough to see the impressive light show the number had included and to hear the (Blaine's not too proud to admit it) even more impressive vocals it featured.   
  
Blaine scans the lineup of high schoolers flouncing around the stage. One of them is the one who posted this video. He spots Sam and he aches a little, but there's no way the OP is him. There's that incredible black soloist, super-tall guy, dancers, pushy lead girl, scary Latina... Blaine barely remembers most of them. He has no idea who this could be.  
  
He dives into the "related videos" on YouTube but there aren't any of the Warblers, just another one of the Louisiana group (McKinley, the video says, he remembers that now) doing Lady Gaga's Born This Way with their cheesy-cute T-shirts. This one, Blaine does remember one stand-out from: the slim brown-haired boy whose shirt had garishly proclaimed "LIKES BOYS." Blaine remembers thinking how tacky that was, and being a little bummed out that the one openly-gay kid on the tour who wasn't from Dalton needed to broadcast it so intensely. It definitely put him off the group - the whole number did.  
  
He also remembers Pushy Lead Girl more clearly once he sees her "NOSE" tee, and that's what finally makes him reblog the video off Chandler and add his own comments.  
  
**jumpupbubbleup:**

> Oh my gosh, are you from this McKinley group? Our whole choir HATED you guys! :P

  
Blaine chuckles to himself, adds  _#except for Sam :(_  in the tags, and then catches sight of the clock at the bottom of his desktop and swears softly. This paper is due tomorrow and he's barely even halfway done. Banishing the weird show choir reminiscing from his mind - though swearing he's going to call Jeff tomorrow, he knows he's in New York too and they connect so much less often than they really should - Blaine makes himself sit up and haul a couple of his reference texts into his lap, skimming half-heartedly for please, just  _one more good quote..._  
  
He lasts about twenty minutes and writes, like, half a paragraph before his open Tumblr tab sucks him back in, informing him he has 8 new posts. Six of them are Chandler. One is another mind-blowing work of art from this adorable lesbian painter from Maryland he started following last week, and one is a hipster Instagram of a really sweet pair of brogues that Blaine is suddenly coveting (he one-clicks it to his queue).   
  
And buried in the notes of people liking that stupid video he posted a few days ago of his brother in that free credit commercial, there's a reblog from "kurtrageous," with some more text added on below the Don't Stop Believin' video.  
  
Blaine clicks to the blog almost immediately to read the full thing -   
  
**kurtrageous:**

> WHAT? Were you on this tour??? Oh my god, are you from that prep school from - Iowa  ~~(Ohio? Indiana? What is geography)~~...wait, why did you hate us??

  
Blaine laughs, casting a cursory glance over the soft, minimalistic chicness of kurtrageous's custom blog theme and then drifting up to reblog almost instantly.  
  
**jumpupbubbleup:**

> LMAO. Ohio! But yeah, the thing was that my friend Jeff (the super-blond guy from our group) had a HUGE thing for that girl in your choir with the "NOSE" shirt, but then the one time he tried to make a move on her, that really, really tall kid turned out to be her boyfriend, and he scared the crap out of Jeff and made him feel like a loser. Because I guess he was on the football team, or something? And said some not-nice things about boys from private schools (we are NOT a "prep" school, FYI!), and IDK, I guess hurt Jeff's feelings. So we all decided to stand in solidarity with Jeff and hate you guys a lot, haha. Plus, since you guys went to Nationals that year and we didn't, you kind of hogged all the stage time from the rest of us....

  
Once he's done reblogging, Tumblr loops him back to kurtrageous's blog automatically, and Blaine finally decides he's going to check it out. The chicness pervades everything, the whole theme and even some of the post content clearly focused on aesthetics: black and white photographs, no two posts of too much similarity back-to-back with one another, a clear eye for fashion and the visual, no extraneous design elements. Blaine ends up going pages and  _pages_  back before he even realizes it, and catches at least one nice men's ensemble that he himself reblogged, as well as some audio posts from some of his very favorite musicals. They've clearly taken different approaches to blogging, but considering their mutual interests and their shared pasts in embarrassing-but-fun high school show choir, he and this guy (and Blaine thinks it's a guy, he's just got a hunch, though the post content is all incredibly gender-neutral) are not at all dissimilar people.  
  
He finally gets to a post tagged  _#here you go it's my face #enjoy it while you can this won't be happening again any time soon_. The image is taking a while to load, but when it finally does, Blaine gasps "oh my god" abruptly for the second time that evening.  
  
It's that kid. That "LIKES BOYS" kid with the brown wispy hair and the nice countertenor. (Okay, maybe Blaine remembers a little bit more about everything than he really cares to admit.) It's a professional-grade photograph, not an over-filtered Instagram or a webcam snap or anything, and it's caught him in three-fourths profile with his bangs swept artful-casual up back from his forehead and his neck craned just-so that a glimpse of throat is visible overtop of the fabulous scarf he's wearing. Compositionally it's stunning.  
  
Boy-wise it's not so bad either.  
  
Blaine's having a hard time reconciling this sleek aesthete with the show-choir kid of the past, but his curiosity is so piqued that he almost can't make himself pop back to the dashboard to see if the guy has re-reblogged back. But he has -   
  
**kurtrageous:**

> SNORTING IRL. The "really, really tall kid" is my stepbrother and if you truly know him he is about as intimidating as a gerbil. I am so sorry that he ruined us for you. Please, please forget anything he ever said. As for "NOSE" girl, I'll have to ask her if she remembers this Jeff of yours ;) And as for us hogging the stage time...sorry I'm not sorry!

  
There's also a note on his dash that Blaine finds even more fascinating:  _ **kurtrageous**  started following you_.  
  
His face stretching in a tiny glimmer of a smirk despite himself, Blaine goes back to his blog and follows him back.  
  
(And then, by god, he makes himself finish this horrible paper.)

 

  
  
**II. #meme**  
  
So Kurt's probably Blaine's favorite person he's found on Tumblr yet.  
  
Once he started following him, Blaine realized he and Kurt have even more in common than he anticipated. Their appreciation for fashion is mutual and with a lot of overlap (though Kurt tends much more toward the avant-garde and envelope-pushing; Blaine supposes he's not calling himself "outrageous" for nothing), their music taste is even more compatible (Blaine's a little more pop, Kurt's a little more showtunes, but they never hate any of each other's guilty pleasure stuff), and they even share a love for trashy reality television. Blaine stops being surprised when Kurt is #1 on his Tumblr "crushes" week after week, or when Kurt will reblog something Blaine never would have expected and yet can seamlessly fit into his understanding of Kurt's favorite things. For the first time in a while - and definitely for the first time exclusively on Tumblr - Blaine feels like he's making a genuine online  _friend_  and not just a casual pal he can talk to about collegiate a cappella or the woes of extra-curly hair.  
  
One Friday near the start of the spring semester, Blaine has blissfully knocked out all of his film studies homework and is allowing himself a full weekend of veg-out relaxation to do literally nothing, so naturally his first order of business is to throw himself onto his bed and plop his laptop on his stomach to check Tumblr. His addiction has bordered on dangerous a couple of times, but he's managed to keep on top of his studies, something Blaine is proud of to a kind of pathetic degree. He hasn't been on since mid-day yesterday and he's excited to space out into catching up on his dash, drop a couple things in his queue, and talk to Kurt and Chandler.  
  
**jumpupbubbleup:**

> In the immortal words of one Ms. R. Black: It's Friday!! And I am most certainly looking forward to the weekend, weekend.

  
He contemplates uploading the song, but decides to just make it as a text post. When it kicks him back to his dashboard, the first thing Blaine spots is an alert about a new message in his askbox. It's from Kurt, and it takes Blaine a few seconds to figure out what it's in response to, before he remembers reblogging an audio of Rio by Duran Duran from Kurt's blog and adding some cryptic tags about his brother....  
  
**kurtrageous asked you:**  
You say you have stories to tell and then you DON'T TELL THEM?? For shame, Mr. Anderson. Please share with the class. Especially with that 'cooper!' tag on there I MUST KNOW  
  
Blaine laughs, rubbing a hand across his face, and answers privately:  _Both us Andersons were performers from an early age, as I'm sure you've deduced.... We may have choreographed a performance to a Rio/Hungry Like the Wolf mashup of our own creation as children that Cooper may have demanded we re-perform as adults to a classroom full of my peers my junior year at Dalton. No, before your ask, there are no videos of this performance. And if there were, I'm sure my face would be so red that it would throw off the color balance of the whole thing and render it unwatchable._  
  
(There is a video, but there's no way Blaine is telling Kurt that.)  
  
The response he gets is just the single word  _CUTE...._  and he doesn't feel the need to answer that with any further extrapolation (though he's laughing in earnest now, and trying not to think about how gaga some of his Warbler buddies had gotten over his "famous" brother), so Blaine returns to his dashboard and starts checking stuff out. He scrolls and scrolls and scrolls, past a fit of dress-up doll posts from Chandler and a YouTube video of the Yale Whiffenpoofs (Kurt told him that one of his girlfriends from high school is actually  _dating_  a Whiffenpoof and Blaine swooned from jealousy) and all sorts of other things, and slowly Blaine can feel his brain begin to unwind from his hectic week of classes that he's still not quite familiar with, the tension of New York in early February evaporating out of his body as his old Dalton sweatshirt and new sherpa blanket and laptop warm him up on the outside and the happy feelings of having great friends on the internet warm him up on the inside.  
  
Blaine finally gives up on his endless scrolling and clicks his arrow to zoom back up to the top, looking in his drafts to see if there's anything he wants to post and scoping out a few individual blogs to make sure he didn't miss anything he might have really wanted to see. By the time he's back on his regular dashboard it's almost half an hour later, and he's got a few new posts to catch up on; several of them are from Kurt, who appears to be indulging in Friday-night tumbling as well, and one of them....  
  
**kurtrageous reblogged thewizardandi-dina**

> [Ask me that one question you've always wanted to know the answer to but you've been scared to ask.](http://kurtrageous.tumblr.com/ask)

  
The tags say  _#go ahead I'm bored_  and clicking the link goes straight to Kurt's ask box.   
  
Blaine's trying to figure out why this is giving him so much pause. Chandler and some of his other friends do memes (or whatever) like this all the time, and there's nothing ever unusual about it; Blaine usually makes some joke like leaving song lyrics that are questions ("why you so obsessed with me?" or "can you pay my telephone bills?" or "is that a hickey or a bruise?" come to his mind almost instantly) and doesn't bother to ask real questions because he doesn't want to come across as creepy. But something about Kurt opening himself up like this has Blaine sitting up a little straighter in his bed and biting his lip a bit, and slowly, the comprehension sort of washes across him, which is that Blaine doesn't  _actually_ know that much about Kurt. Chandler is an absolute open book. Even Blaine himself doesn't hide much online; he pretty much has nothing  _to_  hide. But Kurt, though it's totally in keeping with what Blaine knows about Kurt's personality...Kurt remains kind of an enigma. Blaine knows his likes and dislikes, knows he's from Louisiana and he's a Virgo and he has a stepbrother. Blaine knows that Kurt loves Patti Lupone and hates houndstooth. But what does Blaine know about Kurt's  _life_?  
  
And then, almost as suddenly as this realization bubbled up within him, another sinks hard and fast into the pit of his stomach like a stone, which is that Blaine  _can't_  bring himself to ask any personal, prying questions of Kurt, even on anonymous. Something about the enormity of it all is deep and strange and terrifying, and it's like when his parents give him an iTunes giftcard for his birthday - there's so much,  _so much_  that Blaine wants that he ends up getting nothing, head reeling from the options. Well, it's like that except with about eighty extra layers of  _creepy invasive rude wrong!_  tacked onto the top of it. Blaine could ask Kurt just about anything, and chances are Kurt would answer; he said it himself, he's bored, and he's the one who chose to reblog the post. But Blaine wouldn't know where to begin.  
  
His head's still spinning and spinning and  _spinning_  when Blaine finally clicks the link and his fingers are typing before he fully knows it and when he looks at Kurt's ask box the question he has typed says,  _Whatever happened to Sam Evans?_  
  
There's that, then.  
  
Blaine hits ask before he can second-guess himself and takes a couple of deep, fortifying breaths. He clicks back to his dash and the post is still sitting there, and it looks like Chandler's reblogged it too, and Blaine figures, it's only fair if he lets Kurt ask something back, right? So he reblogs it, changing the link in the post to his own ask box, and then clicks away from Tumblr for a moment to get his head right again, checking his school email and opening up his iTunes and just breathing, breathing.  
  
Suddenly this stress-free night has gotten a little out of hand.  
  
Blaine's only got one message when he comes back. It's hard for him to open - and god, why is this such a big  _deal?_  - but it's only an anonymous question asking him when his birthday is "for science." He answers it with a smily face and kicks back to his dash only to see he's already got another message. He clicks to that one almost without even thinking after the simplicity of the first one only to find Kurt answering his question.  
  
**kurtrageous answered you:**  
_I... I wish I had a better answer to this question than I do, Blaine.  
  
Um. I don't know how much you know about when Hurricane Hanna hit? It didn't get TONS of news coverage because the damage it did was mostly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, not like Katrina was or anything, but it did take out a few things pretty hard, and one of those things was the business that Sam's dad helped run. Their whole family lost almost all their money - that's Sam and his parents and his little twin brother and sister, right - and they were in a pretty terrible place for a while. Sam actually came and stayed with us at my house for a little bit so he'd still be able to go to school rather than having to drop out and find work to help.  
  
When he graduated they still weren't really back on track, and I think Sam was having a hard time dealing with stuff - his parents were insistent on him going to college but he knew they couldn't afford it at all, and I think they had a fight and he just...left. Brittany (our tall blonde dancer friend) was the only one who really heard from him at all before he went and she said he said some stuff about finding himself?? We've all kind of assumed he's ~traveling the world~ or what have you but he could be, like, sleeping on a park bench somewhere.  
  
God, I don't ever really think/talk about this and I'm getting a little overwhelmed. I'm so sorry I had to be the bearer of bad news on this for you. I hope he comes back to us. :( ♥♥♥_  
  
Blaine has to read the whole thing two or three times over before it really sinks in. So not only does Blaine not know where his best pen-pal friend is,  _neither does anyone else_. The emotional impact it's having on him is tremendous and weird. On the one hand, it's devastating; on the other hand, nothing's really changed, has it? Just because Blaine suddenly knows why he hasn't heard from Sam in a year and a half doesn't change the fact that Blaine hasn't heard from him. He's still missing, just in a deeper, realer way.  
  
"Tumblr is  _weird_  tonight!" Blaine shouts into the quiet of his room. His iTunes plays softly in the background still.  
  
Blaine shuts his laptop with a firm  _snap_  and gets up to make himself some hot chocolate. It's not all that great, since he has to make it in the microwave, but it's warm and liquid-sweet, and he flashes to the way that Harry Potter could always shake off the fright of a dementor by eating some chocolate. It feels like that. He bobs and dances oddly around his room while he waits for it to heat, trying to shake the weirdness of the sudden heaviness in the air and on the internet. By the time he crawls back into his bed, mug in his hand and I Kissed A Girl in his speakers, Blaine thinks he's ready to try again for his lazy relaxing evening on the internet.  
  
His browser is still open to his answer from Kurt, and he shakes himself and hastily clicks straight to Kurt's blog, eager to see what other kind of silly questions he may have gotten. There's an anon that Blaine instantly pins as Chandler, an ask that says  _Are you descended from Cleopatra? Because you've got a killer asp!_  to which Kurt has replied "You don't even know what my asp looks like, nonners" with a gif of some huge-butted girl twerking, and the laugh that shakes through Blaine finally has him feeling a bit more at sorts. He also has a question from a fashion blog about one of his design sketches he posted a month or so ago (Blaine had been so taken with it he'd tried to like it more than once), which he's answered very politely and adorably. And there's one more anonymous question:  
  
_Anonymous -- > you reblog pictures of new york all the time and you say you want to live there, right? what's keeping you! you belong there bb!!_  
  
Blaine's smile twists a little, curious. Kurt  _does_  want to come to NYC; Blaine's been following his blog long enough to figure that much out. And Blaine must admit it would be awesome if Kurt were to suddenly be within subway distance of his own dorm room. The smile fades a little as he reads Kurt's answer, though:

> Okay, anon, listen up because I'm only going to answer this once, and only because you asked so sweetly. I love the City. I have no doubt in my heart that I belong there. But apparently the universe has other plans. I was all set to go there straight out of high school, but the university I'd chosen (coughcough rhymes with Mazda Miata), while it accepted my best friend, rejected me pretty soundly. Plans = dashed to bits. It was while I was working on a backup plan the following winter (which I admit I should've thought of sooner, joke's on you, Kurt) that my dad suffered a serious heart attack and was unconscious for almost two weeks. Awesome right!! There was no way I was leaving after that. I had to at least stay until he was in the clear healthwise, and by that point it was too late to get a second-semester audition, and there's still always the risk that he'll suffer another if he didn't make some serious lifestyle changes, which I naturally had to monitor because there's no way he was going to do it himself.
> 
> So yeah apparently I'm not meant to go to New York, apparently I'm meant to help my father and mentor my old high school glee club and work 25 hours a week at my favorite local coffee shop. Life could be so much worse. I still do karaoke at Applebee's Thursday nights. :)

  
And there it is: the exact kind of personal question Blaine's been twisting up inside trying to figure out how to ask. A few more pieces of the Kurt puzzle fall into place right before his eyes, and Blaine's worried, because he's starting to like the picture they paint a little bit less. How can Kurt ever believe that he doesn't deserve everything he wants in life? Blaine knows Kurt was a year ahead of him in school; his dad's heart attack is a full two years behind them now, and if he hasn't experienced anything else since then Blaine's pretty certain he's in the clear. And also doesn't Kurt have a stepmom who would totally look out for him even if Kurt weren't around? The more Blaine looks at the answer Kurt had given, those glib exclamation points and that little smiley at the end, the more it just sounds so incredibly...defeated. Someone squeezed all the air out of Kurt's dreams, and Kurt is so convinced that that means it was  _popped_ , punctured irreversibly, when Blaine - Blaine's not so sure that it wasn't just untied from the bottom, sent whizzing around the room making that stupid farting sound.  
  
(Blaine lost control of this metaphor somewhere.)  
  
He's never seen Kurt get this personal online, and Blaine can't help but soak it up, hold it close to him with all the other great and fascinating things he knows about his friend. With a little shake of his head, Blaine makes himself leave Kurt's page behind and go back to his dashboard. Naturally, he's got a couple of messages from the meme too.  
  
**Anonymous asked you:**  
Did you go to Beyonce's culinary school? Because you are TOO bootylicious for me, baby.  
  
Blaine answers this with  _Chandler, go to bed._  
  
**Anonymous asked you:**  
you seem to place a lot of value on your internet friends, and like i never see you talk about any """irl""" friends. are these relationships more significant to you or??  
  
Tumblr is  _weird_  tonight.  
  
What's even weirder, what takes Blaine by surprise almost just as much as anything has on this (weird,  _weird_ ) Friday night, is how quickly the answer comes to him.

> Short answer...yes, actually. I think something about e-relationships that makes them so much stronger than real-world friendships in certain cases is the serendipity of it all. You meet someone in real life because you frequent the same locations, you're thrown into similar situations: Oh, we have a class together, yes you can borrow my pencil. Oh, I've seen you in this coffee shop before, no I haven't tried their chocolate biscotti, is it any good. When you meet someone online, it's for one of two reasons: A) You have a void in your real-world relationships that you're seeking to fill, and you're hunting for someone who understands you in a way none of the randoms you see day-to-day truly can, like a piece is missing. Having been so involved in LGBT communities online I believe VERY strongly in the strength and influence of this. Or B) You randomly bump into someone that you're not even prepared to meet across the whole great spectrum of the internet - which, remember, could conceivably be ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD geographically - and you click in such a strong, innate way that your friendship forms from, like, the ether. Lol inarticulate there at the end but tl;dr I LOVE MY INTERNET FRIENDS. They're actually the best people I know. :D

  
Once he's satisfied with his answer Blaine publishes it, studying on the anon question a little more, trying to figure out if he thinks it's the same person who sent Kurt that question about New York - the diction is remarkably similar. He's still staring at it when he realizes suddenly that the same Katy Perry song has been on loop on his iTunes for like the past twenty minutes and he laughs to himself and takes it off repeat, letting it shuffle away to Hey Monday and some other stuff as he catches back up on his dash from his weirdness/hot chocolate/more weirdness spell. Chandler posted a really cute picture of himself with a snowman he made that's supposed to be his boyfriend, and he wants to hate it but he can't, really, especially with the way he totally got his hair right. He likes it, and leaves a reply of  _snow-tally adorable!_  because he knows Chandler hates his bad puns.  
  
There's another question in his ask not too long after, and it's from Kurt.   
  
**kurtrageous asked you:**  
You don't know ANYONE better than us? :P  
  
Blaine answers,  _Not here in New York._  
  
And Tumblr is officially too weird, and he shuts his laptop again, and rolls over and goes the hell to bed.  
  
"We we we so excited," he mutters to himself.

 

 

  
**III. #queue**  
  
_from:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
blainers!!!  
  
Blaine grabs some napkins, wiping the grease of his pizza dinner from his hands so he can prepare himself for what is probably about to be a tedious and silly text message conversation. He hates when his Dumb Friend Chandler does this - he'll text him with just his name, or worse, with just the word "Hey," and drag everything out four or five texts longer than he needs to. It's probably a pet peeve that a kinder person wouldn't have, but if Blaine wanted to make small talk, he'd have a real phone call with voices and everything. He sighs and answers.  
  
_to:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
chandler.  
  
_from:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
whaaaat r u doing on like march 12 or 13? :D  
  
_to:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
ive got class, thats your spring break but its not mine, remember?  
  
_from:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
but class is just during the day right? like what do u have in the evening??  
  
_to:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
i dont know, c, im not exactly thinking that far in advance  
  
_from:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
WRONG ANSWER!!!!  
_from:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
what ur doing is coming 2 c TOMMY w/ me!!!!! AMIRITE  
  
Blaine's annoyed expression vanishes instantly in favor of a wide, astonished grin. The current Broadway revival of The Who's Tommy has been taunting Blaine ever since it opened, with the knowledge that it was playing right across town but that he had yet to reach a point where he had both the time and the money to go see it. Chandler, meanwhile, never has the trouble shelling out for an extra ticket if it means someone will actually go see things with him; he and his boyfriend have a lot of things in common but his fanatical love for Broadway is not one of them. Blaine's more than happy to capitalize on the opportunity.  
  
And like.  _Tommy_. Nothing gets Blaine's theatre blood pumping harder than watching a phenomenal performance of a role he'd like to play himself one day. Between that and The Who he can't believe this is finally actually happening.  
  
_to:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
WHY DIDNT YOU SAY THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE youre so dumb, of course im coming with you!!  
  
_from:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
AS IT SHOULD BE. its cool if i stay w/ u rite? in the city  
  
_to:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
absolutely! is it just the two of us at the theatre or is j finally going to come? is the who enough to lure him in? hahaha  
  
_from:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
no, alas, just u n me  
_from:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
altho if u wanted 2 invite a +1 i wont stop u.....provided he can get to ny all the way from looziana on such short notice ;) ;) ;)  
  
And just like that, Blaine's back to annoyed. Because Blaine's Dumb Friend Chandler can't seem to shake this notion that Blaine and Kurt are "meant to be." No matter how many times Blaine insists that Kurt is just his friend - that he  _likes_  being friends with Kurt, that he wants it to  _stay_  that way, and how annoying he thinks the concept of "two gay guys can't just be friends, they must be involved!" is - Chandler tries to point out little ways in which they are apparently "perfect" for each other. Their infinitely compatible fashion sense and music tastes. Their unconventional relationships with their brothers. Their shared love of New York City and all the mystical, mysterious things it holds. (He's also quick to remind Blaine that  _they_  are friends, and yet they've never once tried to date, so no one is proving any cliches to be true.) It's annoying. But it's typical Chandler-annoying, so Blaine is doing his best to ignore it.  
  
_to:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
unless youve got the cash for a third ticket it should probably just stay you and me. lol.  
  
_from:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
fiiiiiine, fine, but u know u should rly be gettin some of that by now  
_from:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
all im sayin is he is RUULLLLLL qt and u know we have like the same taste in dudes so u cant tell me u dont c it  
  
(Blaine will admit Chandler has a point there. Though Chandler's tastes often seem to be "anything breathing with a cute face and a penis" from an outsider perspective, Blaine knows he definitely has a type when it comes down to it, and it makes a decent Venn diagram with Blaine's own. Blaine's actually always found Jeremiah to be quite the charmer and will even confess to being a little jealous when he and Chandler first started dating.)  
  
_to:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
what are you even talking about, though. he never posts pictures of his face.  
  
_from:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
FALSE!! false. blainers u need to up ur tumblr stalking skillz  
_from:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
ive found a good 4 or 5 on his blog alone PLUSSSS u can just go to his profesh site!! smh  
  
_to:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
well excuuuuse me if STALKING isnt exactly one of the "skillz" i pride myself on *eyeroll*  
  
_from:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
u have still not ttly succumbed 2 the tumblr beast, then  
_from:_   **Chandler Kiehl**  
consider urself lucky u have been spared  
  
They go back to talking about Tommy after that, and arranging the rest of their plans for when Chandler takes the bus down from Connecticut to figure out which night they're going and make sure they can get their tickets secured. Blaine gets pretty jazzed about the show - who is he kidding, he gets downright squealy - and finishes his pizza and diet Sprite in great spirits, dumping his plates and heading back to his room from the dining hall with a spring in his step and Pinball Wizard already stuck in his head. Naturally, his immediate instinct is to blog about it.  
  
**jumpupbubbleup:**

> THIS JUST IN: Tumblr user Chandler kiehlingmesoftly and I are going to see the revival of THE WHO'S TOMMY in slightly less than a month! I'M PRETTY MUCH SCREAMING. One of my favorite musicals AND one of my favorite long-distance friends? It basically can't get better and it's not even MY spring break! :D :D :D 
> 
> Brace yourselves for me reblogging a LOT of Tommy stuff in upcoming weeks, sorry I'm not sorry.

  
He gets reblogged almost instantly by Chandler, who adds simply  _TOMMY IS A TRANQUILIZER!!_ , a screencap of his Megabus itinerary, and a gif of Giselle from Enchanted flailing her hands in excitement. High on their planning, Blaine dives into the #Tommy tracked tag without really thinking it through and is confronted with The Who but also Rugrats and Power Rangers and all sorts of other bizarre, totally unrelated junk. "Blahhh," he says out loud, and returns to his dash, refusing to let his spirits get down.  
  
His post has another note, and he's pleased to see that it's from Kurt.  
  
**kurtrageous reblogged you**  
How thrilling! You'll have to tell me how the female lead does, I've heard she's one to watch. Smash some mirrors for me ;)  
  
It's the tags Kurt's put on it that catch Blaine's attention, though:  _#and also I'm really glad to hear that you get to spend some irl time with chandler #sometimes I worry about you just sitting alone in your single room doing homework and blogging ♥ #but now you get real hang-out time with real people so hooray!_    
  
He looks up from his monitor, catching his own eye in the mirror on the back of his door. Did he - does Blaine really sound that pathetic? Even through the internet to someone who's only known him for about three months? Maybe he doesn't go out partying with a ton of fraternity pals every weekend, and maybe he does spend a lot of time blogging. Chandler spends a  _ton_  of time blogging and Kurt's never "worried" about him. And maybe he does focus kind of heavily on his homework, but he's just trying to get good grades and make sure he's making the most of his education, and maybe he did just eat dinner alone in the cafeteria but -   
  
"Oh my god."   
  
Oh my god, Blaine doesn't really have any friends.  
  
But that's not true! He has Chandler...in Connecticut. And Tasha in Maryland, and Kurt in Louisiana, and Jackie in Wisconsin and his brother in California and Wes back in Ohio. He has Jeff, who lives just on the other side of the city, but the last time they hung out was probably before Christmas; he has Sam, or at least he used to, and now he doesn't even  _know_  where he is. Everyone who's closest to Blaine's heart is at least one state border away from Blaine's body. Blaine loves his internet friends from the bottom of his goddamn  _soul_  but in the case of nearly all of him, that's all they are: his internet friends. They're not people he studies with in the library or gets drinks with at the bar.   
  
He blinks at his reflection, and then frowns solidly, first at himself and then at his computer screen and Kurt's tags. Well, so what? Blaine's surrounded himself with people that make him happy and fill his heart, and if those people can nine times out of ten only do so electronically, so be it. Kurt's not the boss of him and if he wants to gush about seeing Tommy with a boy he only catches up with face-to-face about once every couple of months, Kurt totally can't tell him how to live his life. Blaine smiles resolutely and tugs his phone from his pocket, scrolling back through all his texts with Chandler and getting giddy with it all over again. Even going to college in New York for almost two years now, Blaine doesn't get to indulge in Broadway very often, and this is easily going to be the highlight of what has already been a tricky, strenuous semester.  
  
_all im sayin is he is RUULLLLLL qt_  Blaine reads again - Dumb Friend Chandler, world-class poet - and he bites his lip, dropping the phone onto his mattress beside him and clicking over to Kurt's blog proper. There is, in fact, a link in his sidebar for his professional website, and the front page is exactly what Chandler implied - several photos of not-the-greatest quality but of the utmost confidence, of Kurt rocking some of his most kurtrageous fashion-forward ensembles. A good two-thirds are from the neck down but some of them include hats and therefore must extend all the way up. It's the most of Kurt's face Blaine thinks he's ever seen, even in those two American National High School Show Choir Concert TOUR! videos.   
  
Blaine's lip slips even further between his teeth as he studies on the photographs. Kurt has downright enviable hair, a rich color that styles up weightlessly into swoops and swirls that Blaine's Medusa-ratnest curls could never achieve in a million years. The hair spills over a pale, high-structure complexion - high forehead, high cheekbones, unique character nose and strong jaw - and tapers down behind his elfin ears to a small scar on his neck that Blaine's never noticed before. In more than one of the pictures there's a small blue feather threaded into his bangs, and Blaine realizes he remembers that feather from the tour, and how wardrobe had a fit when Kurt and a couple of the McKinley girls came back one night with those extensions without having told anyone. So some of these photographs must be several years old.   
  
There's one - exactly one - picture where Kurt is staring directly into the camera, and when Blaine's eyes land on his, he suddenly finds that he can't tug them away. Though the photo is of dubious quality, Blaine can still tell that they're some sort of undefinable clear-blue-green color, with a blaze of self-assured ferocity behind them that it's impossible to fake. His eyes are actually really, really stunning.  
  
Kurt's actually really, really stunning.  
  
"Chandler!" Blaine shouts into his empty room, shaking his head a little and hitting his back-arrow until he's on his dashboard again. This is ridiculous. Blaine and Kurt are not "meant to be." Kurt is Blaine's  _friend_. His really good-looking friend with whom he has a lot in common who worries about him in the tags of his posts complete with little hearts.  
  
Right.

\---

So Blaine is having kind of a low week.

He spends Monday and Tuesday avoiding Tumblr as much as possible in a frantic, desperate effort to make sure he's studied enough for his Modern Playwrights exam. He feels like he's got a pretty good handle on it...until Wednesday, when he walks into the test and discovers that it covers two more chapters of the text than he thought it did, and he's only prepared for one of the two major essay questions. Blaine bombs it worse than he's ever done on anything his whole college career. He's one of the first to finish because there's only so long he can stare at questions he just straight-up doesn't know the answer to before he can't fool himself any longer. He immediately races back to his room and faceplants into his bed, letting out a little scream of rage into his pillow. Because, like,  _really_?  
  
A teeny voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Kurt (which, like, Blaine barely even remembers what his voice sounds like, so how does  _that_  work) decides to remind him that if he knew the number of anyone in his class - hell, if he knew the  _names_  of more than half the people in that class - he probably could have texted someone to double-check on the material for the exam. But he doesn't.   
  
(He kicks his feet into the mattress a couple of times and tells this voice to shut up.)  
  
With that horror out of the way, Blaine finally resurfaces on the internet, and the first post on his dashboard is Chandler squeeing up a storm about his plans with Jeremiah for Valentine's Day on Saturday. He sighs and rolls his eyes so hard it almost hurts, trying not to be a cynical brat about it - but it's hard. The next post down is from Kurt -   
  
Well, sort of.  
  
**kurtrageous reblogged kurtrageous**

> Hello all ♥ Just in case anyone missed it, I'm going out of town for a little bit to celebrate my stepbrother's birthday and I won't have a whole lot of internet access while I'm away! Because I'm Eternalone™ I'll be driving back on Saturday. I threw some stuff in my queue that I hope will tide my adoring public over until then~

  
Blaine's parade has officially been rained on. So maybe just moments before Blaine was grumbling about Kurt's annoyingly accurate insight into his life - the fact still is that lately, Kurt's been one of Blaine's life's only positives. After the clusterfuck that this week is steadily becoming, the last thing he needs is to be completely cut off from anything but queued-up Robo-Kurt until late Saturday night. Who else is he going to hate cheesy Valentine's Day posts with? Who else is going to cheer him up about his hot-mess exam by instead quizzing him on his knowledge of mainstream 90s pop songs and awarding him an A+ for sheer nerdiness? (Okay, maybe Blaine's making that one up, but stranger things have been known to happen.)   
  
Blaine pokes at Kurt's actual blog page a little bit but sees nothing too exciting yet, and instead just slides his laptop shut again and trudges out to the one on-campus food spot he knows is open right now. It may still be freezing outside, but there are some things that can only be mollified by ice cream sandwiches.  
  
It's not till late the following evening, when Blaine's browsing Tumblr in between Googling up some photos he needs for a Powerpoint presentation, that Kurt's queue starts doing anything interesting: There's a picture of Taylor Lautner on his dash.  
  
Blaine snorts a little. Taylor Lautner? Who even talks about that guy any more? Twilight died ages ago, and Blaine doesn't think he's done a single movie since those - at least not that Blaine's ever heard of, and Blaine likes movies enough that he definitely would have heard about it. Lautner's tabloid fodder at best. But the picture seems a little bit older, from back when people must have cared a little bit more, and it's not an unappealing picture. Blaine definitely can't deny that the dude has an amazing body. His eyes trace the hard lines and prominent curves of his musculature (he's shirtless, naturally) and Blaine decides he probably wouldn't kick him out of bed.   
  
This seems to be Kurt's main interest in him as well. The tags say  _#before he gets fat #goodness those SHOULDERS #sighs dreamily_  and Blaine's waning smile revives itself and it's not till he's scrolled down two or three more posts on his dashboard that Blaine realizes he has also surreptitiously reached up and touched his own shoulders through the thin henley he's wearing.  
  
_My shoulders are nice too,_  he thinks, with a bit of defensive sass to it, and oh dear sweet god where did that come from?  
  
He spends the next couple of hours with his arms flexed just a little, for reasons he totally cannot comprehend but  _whatever_ , and right before he goes to bed another of Kurt's queued posts kicks out and this time it's a video. It's got almost a hundred thousand notes, which seems pretty crazy, and also a little out of character for Kurt - he's not the type to post those things that are incredibly "Tumblr-popular" with tons of outdated dorky jokes or whatever. Intrigued beyond anything, Blaine reads the caption -  _They met on Tumblr, and the one girl flew in to meet her girlfriend_  - and then watches it.  
  
Oh, god, it's cute. It's painfully cute, and so sharply touching that Blaine almost starts crying right then and there. The littler of the two is on crutches and she just straight up  _drops them to the floor_  to start hugging and kissing her girlfriend, like any sort of injury or incapacitation she may have means nothing in the face of their relationship. The soft "you can stop now" from the other girl at the end of the video lends credibility and intimacy to the moment and gosh, Blaine is just sort of overwhelmed. He reblogs it almost instantly; it's exactly the sort of thing he stands for, on the internet, connections being forged across the online ether because there's no way to do it in real life, only to ultimately become reality, and especially for young gay people like these two women. Blaine's honestly surprised Kurt didn't tag it with his url (Kurt, unusually, hasn't tagged it with anything) to make sure that Blaine saw it or draw his attention to it, because he's pretty sure Kurt must have posted it especially for him.  
  
Well. But wait. What if.  
  
No, Blaine cuts himself off from that train of thought at once. Well, almost at once. Because his brain is still whirring down the little tributaries of his stream of consciousness, which is that Kurt probably didn't tag it with his name because he was worried Blaine (or, y'know,  _someone_ ) would interpret that as Kurt implying that he wanted this sort of thing  _with Blaine_ , which he obviously doesn't, except if it's so obvious that he doesn't want it, then why didn't he just go ahead and tag Blaine in it anyway, because he should know that people will understand that that's not what he means, and so maybe he  _does_ think people will take it that way and he's  _afraid_  they will because maybe he  _would_  mean it that way if he -   
  
No.  
  
But what if?  
  
what  
  
if???

_\---_

_from:_   **UNKNOWN  
** Um. Hello. Is this Blaine?

Blaine blinks a little at his phone. Yes, he wants to say, it's Blaine, who the hell are you? The number has neither a New York nor an Ohio area code, so he's really confused as to what's going on, and he's still studying on it when his phone buzzes in his hand again -   
  
_from:_   **UNKNOWN**  
(This is Kurt, by the way. I got your number from Chandler? I really hope this isn't too creepy.)  
  
Blaine's confused face cracks in favor of a huge grin and he saves the number to his contacts at once.  
  
_to:_   **Kurtrageous**  
no no not creepy at all!! to what do i owe the pleasure haha  
  
_from:_   **Kurtrageous**  
Oh, you know, the usual. I thought I was going to be able to handle my brother's girlfriend tonight knowing that I can finally get away from her tomorrow but four days is really just three days too many.  
  
_to:_   **Kurtrageous**  
is she that bad then?  
  
_from:_   **Kurtrageous**  
Oh, god, Blaine, I honestly can't stand her. She's just so WEIRD - not eccentric, I adore eccentric, but just that bland, unnerving kind of weird - and that alone would be bad-enough-but-tolerable, but on top of that she treats Finn so badly.  
_from:_   **Kurtrageous**  
I realize the boy tends closer to the "post" side than the "pin" side of intelligence, but he's still a grown adult attending college. She's got no right to condescend to him like this, and everyone sees it but Finn himself because he's just so damn smitten. The thought that he's thinking about marrying this woman....  
_from:_   **Kurtrageous**  
Sorry. Our first non-Tumblr conversation probably shouldn't just be me complaining nonstop about Horse-Face Jennifer. ;)  
  
Blaine laughs. Kurt's holding nothing back tonight - this girl really must be pretty dreadful. Blaine's always respected Kurt's honesty.   
  
(He tells him as much.)  
  
_to:_   **Kurtrageous**  
no worries! i always respect your honesty lol. and its not like i had any other ~thrilling friday night plans that youre keeping me from here  
  
Kurt's next response takes a little bit longer to come through:  
  
_from:_   **Kurtrageous**  
Ooooh, I honestly can't believe you. /shakes fist And yet simultaneously, I'm not surprised.  
  
_to:_   **Kurtrageous**  
whats that supposed to mean? haha  
  
_from:_   **Kurtrageous**  
Exactly what it sounds like. Of course you don't have plans on Friday night.   
  
Blaine's smile fades.  
  
_to:_   **Kurtrageous**  
omg, im not THAT boring, jeez :P  
  
_from:_   **Kurtrageous**  
I guess I'm just speaking from a place of jealousy, here. It just burns me inside to know that you're sitting in the heart of the most magical city on Earth but that on a FRIDAY NIGHT you're not even going to leave your residence hall  
  
_to:_   **Kurtrageous**  
oh and i suppose if you were here youd be so totally living it up?  
_to:_   **Kurtrageous**  
but wait, thats right, youre not here. youre still not in new york.  
  
_from:_   **Kurtrageous**  
Wow, did you have to crouch down for a blow that low?  
_from:_   **Kurtrageous**  
You know why I'm not there and you know that it's killing me. Jesus.  
  
_to:_   **Kurtrageous**  
actually i honestly dont!!  
_to:_   **Kurtrageous**  
your dad is fine, your glee club is fine, im pretty sure the only thing holding you back is you.  
  
_from:_   **Kurtrageous**  
You don't know anything about me. I can't believe you're acting like you do. You're being really immature.  
  
_to:_   **Kurtrageous**  
and youre being a coward.  
  
Blaine takes a deep breath and lets it out more rapidly than he'd like to. This is ridiculous. He can't believe Kurt would be such a  _brat_  about this whole thing, and while at the same time he can't quite believe  _himself_  with how aggressive he's being about the situation, he's been realizing as the words flow from his fingertips that Kurt has needed someone to tell him this for a long, long time. And this is what Blaine does: He finds people who need help, and he helps them. Even if he has to be a dick about it.   
  
Kurt doesn't respond, so Blaine texts again.  
  
_to:_   **Kurtrageous**  
my life may not be super-exciting, but its my life, and im living it the way i want to. i know for a fact that you cant say the same right now.  
_to:_   **Kurtrageous**  
come to new york. ill be here when you do.  
  
_from:_   **Kurtrageous**  
If I ever make it to New York, it will definitely not fucking be because of you, Blaine.  
  
To crown off Blaine's week from hell, he and Kurt stop texting for the night. Blaine's actually pretty sure they're not going to be talking again for a while yet.  
  
He wishes that knowledge didn't hurt so much.

 

  
  
**IV. #meme (redux)**  
  
**kiehlhaul reblogged anunkindnessofcock**

> [Who do you ship me with? Celebs, real people, other tumblrs, etc.](http://kiehlhaul.tumblr.com/ask)

  
"Oh, please," says Blaine, out loud, even though he's sitting alone in the campus coffee shop trying to work on his résumé and people will probably give him weird looks for talking to himself. Blaine  _hates_  this one, especially when it comes from Chandler, because literally all Chandler is doing with this one is fishing for compliments about himself/Jeremiah and how totally, sickeningly adorable they are. It's classic Dumb Friend Chandler behavior that he's just not in the mood for right now, considering he still can't find a new number for the manager he'd worked for at Subway in Ohio now that he'd switched stores and that dude is probably going to be his best reference and ugh, adult life is a pain in the ass.  
  
The worst part about it is the tags, though:  _#everyone do this one #AND REBLOG IT TOOOOOOO!!! #that means you guys: #armaninicole #meaningfulgagalyric #jumpupbubbleup #electricbluestilettos #I'm watching yooouuuuu_. Blaine hates to see his url in that lineup because he knows what Chandler's angling for. And he also knows that if he doesn't reblog this in the next hour, he's going to receive about eight annoying, strongly worded text messages. Might as well suck it up and get it over with.   
  
Blaine reluctantly reblogs and changes the link to his own ask box, tagging with #meme and  _#I hope we can all just ignore this one_  before returning to the Ohio yellow pages website where he continues to make zero progress. He gets up and orders another coffee, along with another of their shitty muffins (they've tried to liven them up with green sprinkles, but it's doing nothing to obscure their lackluster flavor and for crying out loud it's barely even March; but they're dirt cheap and Blaine somehow can't stop eating them), and sits back down at his computer to discover he already has five messages. "Oh,  _please_ ," he says again, and the girl at the booth in the corner side-eyes him from where she's hunched over an assignment for some sort of art class.  
  
One of them is, naturally, from Chandler, and it says in all caps "TUMBLR USER KURT KURTRAGEOUS!!!!!" and Blaine deletes it without even publishing it. The other four?  
  
Also say Kurt.  
  
All in all Blaine gets twelve asks regarding the meme and every single one of them says Kurt or kurtrageous or "that cute boy you're always reblogging from Louisiana." Most of them are anonymous asks, but even a couple of Blaine's friends that aren't Chandler are brave enough to come forward and say it, too.  _I think it could be really good for both of you_  says Tasha from Maryland, who got asked out by her now-girlfriend a few weeks ago on Valentine's and has been sweeter and sappier than usual ever since. And finally, for the first time, Blaine stops and lets himself genuinely wonder:  
  
Is Tasha right?  
  
God, Blaine likes Kurt. He's smart and funny and  _incredibly_  easy on the eyes to an almost criminal degree, and they have so much in common. But that's really the problem: Blaine likes Kurt too much. He definitely likes him too much to dump the prospect of an awkward long-distance relationship onto him when Blaine is historically  _terrible_  at romance and could never put Kurt through something like that. Their friendship as it stands now means everything to Blaine; they're still on a little bit of touchy ground after their fight last month, but there's been some profuse apologizing and things are nearly back to normal, or even better than normal. Blaine doesn't know what he would do if he lost  _that_  Kurt, and he knows there's a ninety percent chance that that's exactly what would happen if he tried to make it into something new. His last online "boyfriend" certainly taught him that.  
  
It could be good for both of them. In some parallel universe where it wouldn't ultimately be really, really bad.   
  
Blaine makes a post about it, since that seems the less ridiculous of his options (really,  _twelve_  asks?).   
  
**jumpupbubbleup:**

> Ha ha, very funny, guys. It's even funnier that some of you seem to think it's never crossed my mind before. Rest assured that it has, and that I'm a big boy and can make my own decisions even if you don't like them. (That goes double for you, Mr. Kiehl.)

  
Blaine can make his own decisions.  
  
But  _twelve people_  are actively disagreeing with him. Not just Chandler. Not just Blaine himself having weird second-guessed thoughts. Twelve whole people, some of whom he probably barely even knows.  
  
Blaine is going to need another shitty muffin to deal with all of this.

 

 

 **V. #TOMMY!!**  
  
Chandler's url has been changed to 'seemefeelmetouchmekiehlme,' which is how you really know it's official: the days of his visit and their outing to Tommy are upon them.  
  
Blaine's vibrating with excitement for days beforehand. He can't even remember what the last Broadway show he saw was - maybe Phantom of the Opera? Book of Mormon? It was one of the two, and they were both great shows but neither held Blaine's personal interest like this one. The girl who works in the computer lab has to tell him off because Acid Queen is so loud in his headphones that the whole room can hear it. And that's not even addressing the subject of his theatre-going outfit, which Blaine's pretty sure he's reconfigured about twenty times based on what Chandler's wearing, the weather forecasts, and this hellacious zit he's getting on his forehead.  
  
March the thirteenth finally arrives and Blaine can't even make himself go to his last class of the day - it's his favorite, too, but he skips it for the first time ever, double-checking train times, the theatre times, his texts from Chandler, the color coord between his hat and his jacket, over and over and over again. He leaves as early as he can justify leaving from his campus with plans to meet Chandler at the theatre and to head home together when the show is over (contrary to what his character would suggest, Chandler's a remarkably light packer for trips, and he's promised he doesn't have a lot of luggage that will trip them up).   
  
The train into the heart of the city is hot and cramped with everyone in their warm coats - winter still hasn't quite checked out for good - and between the tight crowd and Blaine's happy brain whirling a mile a minute, he's positively lightheaded, lost in a warm, glossy haze and only vaguely aware of his surroundings as the juddering subway motions jostle him back and forth like the lulling currents of an ocean. That's why, when they make a stop and some more people squeeze on and one of them stops and  _screams right in his face_ , it's even more disorienting than it probably would have been regularly.  
  
It's not really a scream, if he's being honest. But then again, it's not  _not_  a scream - it's loud, louder in the snug quarters, somewhere between a shout and a gasp and  _jesus_  it's a big sound to be coming out of such a small person, she's barely taller than his shoulders.  
  
The sound finally stops coming out of her mouth and instead she grabs both of Blaine's hands in her own - which is somehow less violating than he'd expect it to be, and she does it with such casual confidence - and looks him dead in the eye, and says very, very seriously:  
  
"Are you Tumblr user Blaine jumpupbubbleup?"  
  
Blaine has no idea what he was expecting her to say, but it definitely wasn't  _that_ , and it's such a surprise that it shocks him into saying "Uh, yes?" before he's even fully processed what's happening.  
  
She screams again. This time it  _is_  a scream, longer and louder like her face has simply broken open where she's smiling to unleash an outpouring of noise, like she wouldn't be out of place at a Beatles concert. It fluctuates as she flails her hands toward different parts of him - like she's aching to touch almost as proof that he's real, but at least has enough social sense to know that would be crossing a line - and other people around them are  _staring_  before she finally takes a couple of deep, rejuvenating breaths and launches from meaningless sounds to mile-a-minute words.  
  
"I knew this day would come," she says fiercely. "Eight point five million people in the city of New York, the odds would indicate that this is borderline impossible but I knew, I  _knew_  our paths would cross, Blaine, because some things are just simply meant to be."  
  
"Do you...follow my blog?" he asks dumbly - he doesn't even have two hundred followers - but he's mistaken her pause for breath and dramatic effect for an actual opening, when this is apparently not the case. She steamrolls forward.  
  
"The man, the myth, the legend, now here in the flesh and  _gosh_  I can see what he sees in you, I thought you'd be taller of course and  _naturally_  I'm well aware that you don't play for my team, and I'm taken besides, but  _goodness_  that's a nice coat and I'm sure it wouldn't be half as nice if it weren't being filled out so well, so really it's just a bit of window-shopping - "  
  
"Who  _are_  you?" Blaine says, because despite how many words have actually come out of her mouth she still hasn't explained, like,  _anything_ , and he's starting to get kind of annoyed.  
  
" - and our paths have crossed at  _last_  and I am sure we are to be fast friends because how could we both mean so much to him without meaning anything to each other as well? I'm Rachel Berry," she adds, almost as an afterthought, and raises her hand in their small bubble of space for a shake.  
  
_Oh._  
  
Blaine's pretty sure his brain comes close to exploding as he tries to filter everything she just said back through the lens of  _Kurt_  after the fact. Because this is Rachel Berry, Kurt's best friend. Rachel "NOSE" Berry whom Kurt has known and loved since high school, who got into NYADA when Kurt didn't, who lives here. In New York City. Where Blaine lives.  
  
"Hi," he says at last, and his hand shaking with hers feels like it's asleep.  
  
"It's an absolute pleasure," she tells him, smiling wide and too-bright. She adjusts her hat, smooths her hands down the buttons of her coat, and then pats her own pocket. "It's a shame we're underground, I can't wait to tell him this happened. He'll probably catch fire with jealousy that I got to meet you first." She's so gleeful, it hurts Blaine to look a little.  
  
"I didn't realize I was such a celebrity," says Blaine.  
  
"Oh, he talks about you constantly," says Rachel. "Just about anything will remind him of you, and then we'll get a tangent about your bow tie with the duckies on it like Barney's from How I Met Your Mother or the decoration scheme in your dorm room, which he approves of, by the way. And he's always showing me your blog, it's how I recognized you so certainly."  
  
"I'm sorry to say I haven't heard nearly as much about you."   
  
"Of course you haven't!" she says with a wink. "I've never heard Kurt talk about anyone the way he talks about you."   
  
Blaine doesn't have an answer for that.   
  
They pass the next couple of stops in silence - a state of being Blaine was starting to suspect Rachel incapable of reaching - and Blaine's pretty sure he runs the gamut of every too-self-conscious nervous tic he's ever had. Takes his hat off, scratches hard through the hair at the back of his skull. Wipes his hand slow down across his face. Picks at the collar of his shirt. Rachel, meanwhile, just stands there and beams, swaying with the motion of the train and sometimes leaning into Blaine's side for stability.  
  
"You're dead serious," he whispers. "About - about all of it." Because she said  _talks about you constantly_ , said  _we both mean so much to him._  She said  _I see what he sees in you._  And that's. That's a lot of things, that she has said, just now.  
  
"What reason would I have," says Rachel, "to lie to a total stranger?"  
  
She winks again, and then bumps hard into him chest to chest as the train makes a stop. "Oh! This is us!"  
  
Blaine checks the station out the window, and sure enough they're only a few blocks from Tommy - this is where Blaine has been planning to disembark all along. Rachel extracts herself from his personal space and worms her way to the door, too. She's already nattering away again as they spill out onto the platform.   
  
" - boyfriend, Brody, he just left NYADA a semester early when they offered him this part, and this is the first chance I'm getting to see the show so I'm  _beyond_  excited tonight even if I hadn't bumped into you, it starts at eight, does Tommy start at eight too? Oooh we better hurry - oh but WAIT!" She stops almost too abruptly and whirls around, yanking out her phone in the same motion and setting it to camera. "We have to, before we go our separate ways. We'll need proof!"  
  
"Proof," Blaine says in a faint echo. He's dazed beyond belief as she tugs him in close, his emotions still roiling like an activating volcano, but when she points the phone toward them with an outstretched arm his brain lights on one pure white glowing thought -  _Kurt_  - and he doesn't think he's ever smiled a truer smile.  
  
"Thank you!" he shouts inadequately, when she's already several strides away. Rachel twirls, smiles, waves her phone, and vanishes into the crowd heading to Aladdin, leaving Blaine feeling like he's been hit by a hurricane. But there's that pure white glowing thought shining within him still -  _Kurt, Kurt, Kurt_  - and his brain is slowly but surely learning to interpret it as the goddamn lighthouse that it really is, and when he follows its shine, it starts leading him to a place that he can understand.  
  
Kurt is the light. Kurt is - Kurt is everything. Blaine doesn't care how badly he wants to keep their friendship from fracturing. He doesn't care that Kurt lives in Louisiana and he lives in New York. He doesn't care that it's 7:51 and the show starts in nine minutes and he hasn't even found Chandler yet, and that he's standing still in the middle of a busy sidewalk and people are colliding with his shoulders on both sides of his body, because he has to do something, and he has to do it  _right now_.  
  
For the first time since their fight exactly one month ago, Blaine makes use of Kurt's phone number. And this time, he  _calls him._  
  
The phone rings. And rings, and rings, and  _fuck_  it's going to go to voicemail. Blaine actually says "fuck" out loud, pressing himself tight against the stone wall of the closest building and trying to get his reception as clear as possible like that's going to magically make Kurt answer, but there it goes:   
  
_Hello, you've reached Kurt Hummel, and I can't take your call right now. If you leave a message I'll get back to you ASAP, and if you're calling for Hummel Tire & Lube and you need more immediate attention you can contact my father at 318, 232 -_  
  
Blaine's so disarmed by Kurt's voice - actually  _hearing Kurt's voice_  for the first time since that deplorable glee club tour, for the first time since Kurt became the light - that he abruptly hangs up. " _Shit!_ " What is  _wrong_  with him? But at the same time, what on Earth is he going to say?  
  
This is actually easier, he tries to reason with himself. If he can spill it all out into a voicemail uninterrupted, surely that will be simpler than if Kurt actually  _were_  to answer his phone, and they'd have to make it into a two-way conversation with talking over each other and awkward gasps and pauses and stutters. If he can just pull himself together long enough to leave a good, solid message, he can just turn his phone off and go see Tommy with his Dumb Friend Chandler and put the whole whirlwind situation on hold for a little while longer.   
  
He just has to come up with what the fuck words he can actually say.  
  
It takes Blaine three more tries before he can even start talking after the beep. His first attempt at an actual message is stumbling, mindblown garbage, and he elects to "erase and re-record" as soon as the robot voice of Kurt's inbox gives him the option. It's not till his fourth try, by which point he's missed two calls from Chandler no doubt trying to figure out where is because the show is starting already, that Blaine reaches a combination of "actually satisfied with what I said" and "oh dear god it's not going to get any better than this is it" and lets the message go through.  
  
"Kurt. Kurt it's Blaine and I just. I was thinking about some stuff, and I was thinking about the internet, and I was thinking, here's a weird thing about the internet, which is that when you meet people there, there's like, there's always this  _filter_ , you know? Not really a filter but just this like other layer of removal that separates you out and not like physically, because obviously, but just - online, the only stuff you learn about a person online is the stuff that person picks and chooses and sticks there for the world to see. That's why it's so easy to pretend to be somebody else, or hide stuff, or whatever. And so when you meet a person you can't see the, the  _clues_ , the signs. There's no little giveaways like the look in someone's eyes or their like, word inflection, like how sometimes you can't hear sarcasm in digital text and you have to over-exaggerate but if you choose not to, there's no way to know, and it's all the choice of that person and you yourself on the other side of the screen can't  _know_.  
  
"And so I, have, I have no idea if, if you could feel, if you feel...about me...the way I feel.... About. You. I can't catch your eye in a conversation that's like, flirty or whatever, and read more into that, in the parts that aren't the stuff you're saying, because all I have is what you're saying. And that's what makes it so  _hard_ , it's so hard, Kurt, because I don't know, and I have to know. I have to know that you feel like I do, because if you don't, Kurt, I honestly, Kurt, I don't know what I'll do.  
  
"I need you to know that you're the light. I need to know that you know, I need to, I want to, I want you to want me. Oh fuck that's a song. I just. Kurt. I can't stop saying your name. It's like Maria. You were Tony, once, weren't you? So you know what it's like. I want to be with, be  _this_ , so much, and I hate long distance and I did it once and it was so hard because he was terrible and all he let me, all you  _see_  is what that person lets you see and you can't ever  _know_ , but I want to be this so much that I don't care any more, because I can't stand it otherwise. I want to be - I want you to drop your crutches for me." (This is the part where Blaine starts crying.) "I want you to see me and to d-drop your crutches right onto the ground because I want to be all the support you need.  
  
"So this is me. This is the - signs. P-putting out there exactly what I want the world to see which is that I need you, Kurt, I need you to b-be this with me. You can c-come to New York and be the light and be -  _everything_  - oh god - " He's actually sobbing and at least one guy on the street has shot him some weird, dirty look, and he has no idea how to stop sobbing into his phone into Kurt's inbox so he just gives up and says "Thank you. Please. Goodbye. Kurt." And he hangs up, and clutches his phone to his chest, and sinks to the ground of the grungy New York sidewalk, heaving until he can pull his shit together and stand back up.  
  
He turns his phone off, and runs to the theatre to find Chandler. He's going to need a lot more than The Who to recover from this one, but he's been looking forward to this for too damn long, and it'll at least be a start.  
  
\---  
  
"What is  _wrong_  with you?" Chandler hisses at him, snatching at his arm with an unnervingly clawlike hand as soon as the lights rise for intermission.  
  
"Hello to you too," says Blaine - they haven't been able to speak until just now because he crawled into the theatre so late. Blaine  _is_  happy to see him, after all.  
  
"Were we not rhapsodizing about the wonder of this production for over a month?" Chandler says dramatically. "Were we not marveling with awe about the  _sixteen_  quick-changes Mrs. Walker has in the opening number, and how excited we were to see that? And then you are absurd and flagrant enough to  _miss the opening number??_ "  
  
"Chandler," says Blaine, cautionary. "Listen to yourself."  
  
"You listen to  _your_ self!"  
  
"No, C, I'm serious," Blaine says. "Everything you're saying is one hundred percent true. Obviously. So don't you think that like. Um. The fact that I missed all of that, and stuff, means that I was missing it for a really truly super important reason?"  
  
Chandler huffs, but deflates a little, though he's still side-eyeing Blaine something fierce from around his new glasses frames (which fit his face much better than his old ones, Blaine is impressed). "Fine. But Lucy, you've got some 'splainin' to do."  
  
Blaine smiles weakly, his stomach churning at the idea of telling anyone else about The Voicemail (it's already got capital letters in his head). "Uh, sure. Later, I swear."  
  
"Whatever," says Chandler, his own smile creeping back into place too. It's one of the things Blaine likes the most about him: the reverse of the double-edge of his flightiness means that he gets happy again just as easily as he gets mad. "Here's your program." Chandler thwacks the paper into Blaine's chest harder than is necessary and Blaine takes it with a laugh, fumbling a little. A slip of paper for a cast member replacement falls out before he can catch the whole thing and Blaine stoops to pick it up.   
  
_The role of  
"Tommy Can You Hear Me?" Soloist #1  
will be performed tonight by   
Samuel L. Evans_  
  
Blaine promptly drops it again. His jaw is quick to follow suit. When he manages to snap it closed, he literally says out loud, "Tonight is the absolute craziest night of my life."  
  
"Blaine, I think  _you're_  the cray-cray at this point, señor." But Blaine barely hears Chandler. He's scrambling through his program proper, looking for the cast bios, hoping for more than a line or two, anything that will help him know for sure, because that's gotta be a pretty common name  _and yet_  -   
  
_"Samuel L. Evans is proud to be making his Broadway debut with THE WHO'S TOMMY, having spent the past two years performing in what he calls "a much shadier capacity" under the alias White Chocolate. Sam is a graduate of McKinley High School in Baton Rouge, La. (Go Panthers!) and would like to thank Stevey and Stacey for their life-long support and sweetness, and the New Directions for giving him one."_  
  
"Chandler?" Blaine says softly.  
  
"Yeah B?"  
  
"Will you uh. Come to the bathroom with me so that I can. Maybe. Vomit?"  
  
\---  
  
Blaine doesn't vomit. Blaine sits in his seat in row O of the orchestra and watches the entire second act exactly as he'd planned to, though perhaps in even slightly more of an entrancement, because right there in act II scene 4, no longer dyeing his hair blond and fighting a little against the pit but doing a pretty damn impressive job, is Blaine's pen-pal Sam Evans. He both is and is not surprised that he hadn't recognized him in act I. The production lives up to the hype even independently from this, and Chandler stays for the curtain call clapping his hands to a pulp, but Blaine can't, because Blaine absolutely needs to be front and center at that stage door when  _"Tommy Can You Hear Me?" Soloist #1_  walks out of it.  
  
"Don't be rude!" Chandler hisses under the applause.  
  
"I," Blaine stammers out. He can't make his mouth do anything else.  
  
There's already a crowd outside, groups of people from the mezzanine who'd left even earlier than Blaine did - the actor playing Cousin Kevin had a Disney channel show not too long ago, and his fan following is kind of ridiculous - but Blaine manages to push and charm and coerce his way to the second row back from the barricade, and the lesser actors that come out first don't agitate the crowd that much. And then honest to Jesus Christ Sam Evans is standing  _right there_  and Blaine  _found_  him and he doesn't even know what to do and he says, "Sam," and he's not even extending his program for signatures or anything, he just says "Sam, Sam," over and over again and then Sam notices him and Blaine is relieved and so so heart-warmed to see that Sam's face breaks into the exact awestruck giddiness that his own face is radiating like the surface of the goddamn sun.  
  
"BLAINE ANDERSON?" Sam shouts, and Blaine's about to start crying for the second time that night, and Sam politely asks the girl between them to step aside so that Blaine can come forward and over the chilly metal barrier they hug, Sam toasty-warm from the adrenaline of the show and palming across Blaine's back like they're each other's lifelines.   
  
"This is crazy," Blaine whispers against his (brown, seriously, this is unusual) hair.  
  
"This is a _mazing_ ," says Sam, wide mouth stretched in a wider grin. "I didn't know how to get in touch with you because I had your old number and couldn't find your new one, and I didn't know really who any of your friends were to ask for it, and - "  
  
"I don't," says Blaine. "Uh. Friends. I don't have much in the way of friends."  
  
"Well, that shit's about to change. I can't go out tonight because I'm trying to conserve my voice a little but the next time the cast hits the town you're fucking coming with me. This is ridiculous."  
  
It is ridiculous.  
  
Because four hours later, Chandler snoring softly in his sleeping bag on Blaine's floor, Blaine remembers that he never turned his phone back on after the show (Sam, being a smartass, signed his program, and added his number underneath) and when he does, there are exactly two new text message sitting in it, and they're from Kurt, and this is what they say:  
  
_from:_   **Kurtrageous**  
So the rational, logical part of me is pretty sure that I should give this at least a day to work out, but the whimsical romantic part of me is way too thrilled by the concept that our anniversary could be Friday the Thirteenth. And I'm pretty sure whimsy just won.  
_from:_   **Kurtrageous**  
So um. It didn't reeeaally sound like you were actually asking a question? But nevertheless I'm feeling like my answer is yes. Insert whimsy here:  <333333  
  
And Blaine's hands clutch at the air, the darkness, his own face, and he tries not to just let loose some pure animal noise for fear of waking Chandler, because he is honestly incapable of comprehending how he has suddenly managed to get everything he has ever wanted.  
  
New York.  _Friends_.  
  
Kurt.  


  
**VI. #NSFW**  
  
Sam's got quite the task cut out for him trying to keep Blaine distracted from the fact that Kurt gets there to visit in less than two days. He was nice enough to take Blaine out after his Thursday night show (he's back to just ensemble now that the other soloist has come back from his honeymoon, mostly dancing), and he tried so hard, joking about how his middle name doesn't even start with L but he did it once as a riff on Samuel L. Jackson and it stuck, regaling him with the weirdest anecdotes from his stint as a stripper (a  _stripper!_ ) and even showing off his abs (which Blaine admits are literally  _nothing_ to shake a stick at, jesus) as they knocked back virgin cocktails and indulged in some absurd punch-drunk karaoke with Rachel (who brought Brody) and some pianist named Pascal. Chandler's putting forth a valiant effort, too, bombarding Blaine's ask box on Tumblr with questions from memes that Blaine hasn't even reblogged, asking the size of his dick and the color of his underwear and his favorite flavor of specialty coffee creamer (which duh, Chandler, everyone knows is caramel, how are you even asking that question). But both of them know - and Blaine  _knows_  that both of them know, bless their hearts - that nothing is going to eclipse this.  
  
Kurt Hummel is coming to New York and he and Blaine are going apartment hunting, because it's April and Kurt moves in May and starts school in August.  
  
Commence screaming, freaking out that necessitates distraction, etc.  
  
Blaine's taken to spending hours at a time combing through Kurt's blog, old posts sometimes from before Blaine even started following him but more often heart-wrenchingly nostalgic ones from back around when they first met, when they were struggling through this mess together. (He was doing this in turns with studying for his finals, trying to be responsible, but it's too close now. It's literally the day after tomorrow.) He trips across that post on his own blog from when he got all those asks "shipping" him with Kurt and does this gross kind of laughing/sobbing hybrid thing in the back of his throat a little. He finds that unnecessarily huge back-and-forth conversation they had about houndstooth (Kurt is strongly against it; Blaine still maintains that if the print itself is subtle or it's used in a small dose then there's nothing wrong with it). And here, in a stretch of posts Blaine must have missed during midterms or that power outage in his building or something -   
  
Oh. Oh wow. It's rare that Kurt posts anything so blatantly sexual in nature on his blog, so concerned is he with aesthetics and taste, but then again this is quite the  _classy_  photo of an erect penis?? Blaine's sure he would remember if he'd seen this post when Kurt made it originally, because the juxtaposition of  _erotica_  and  _Kurt_  like this might have snapped him to his senses a whole month or so before that run-in with Rachel on the subway. His eyes roll shut and his brain fogs over for a moment or so before he can start breathing and thinking normally again, and god, his mouth is practically watering. This is embarrassing.   
  
(Kurt is staying with Rachel when he comes up to visit, for the sake of propriety and appearances. Blaine is pretty sure that Kurt will not actually be spending any nights at Rachel's.)  
  
He tries to continue in his e-walk down memory lane, but that picture won't dislodge itself from his head, and it's making his leg jiggle against the floor under his desk, making him shoot furtive glances around his dorm room for no good reason. Making him, maybe, a little bit hard in his jeans, until Blaine can't take it any more and he starts to get a little mischievous and heads back to Kurt's front page to send him some fanmail.  
  
_Do you ever worry that sometimes we're going to miss out on the one fun part of long-distance relationships by moving in together so fast?_  he writes, fingers flying over the keyboard before he can second-guess himself.  _It's just that I was on your blog, just now, and I happened to stumble across this post:<http://kurtrageous.tumblr.com/post/34190440368>, and I couldn't help but want to write to you about it. Because I'm just thinking, right now, of what I would do if that was you. When that IS you, in my bed like that. Or our bed._  Blaine takes a deep breath and surges forward.  _I've only ever had two boyfriends before you, but I've been told I'm pretty damn good at giving head, and if you were in my bed like that I would have to. Like, I'd be incapable of resisting. I'd slide on my stomach up between your legs, and I would suck you right up until you hit the back of my throat. I want you to be all the way inside of me like that. I'm so hungry, Kurt._  
  
Blaine scratches at his neck - it's really hot, he must be flushed red, he can feel it - and adjusts himself a little, palming softly at his cock through his pants and trying not to let this get too out of hand. He's doing fine until Kurt messages him back.  
  
_Mmmm, I wasn't aware that my shiny new boyfriend was a blowjob expert. If that's the case I will be requiring the full-service experience. Because have I ever told you how much I like your hair? I love your hair, Blaine, it's so curly and fabulous. And I think pulling tight on it while you gag on my cock would be amazing._  
  
Blaine groans, loud and sounding shamefully sexual to his own ears. He's almost fully hard now and this is totally ridiculous, because he's never heard Kurt say anything that  _filthy_  and it shakes him down to his absolute  _core_  but at the same time he kind of almost doesn't really want what is effectively their "first time" to be Tumblr cybersex when Kurt is actually going to be there in touchable, kissable reality in less than forty-eight hours. So when he opens up the window to message back, as tempting as it is to start a paragraph  _I run my thumbs up the thick of your thighs and bury my face deeper, because you taste incredible and I just want to get you off so badly_ , it's not what he writes. What he writes is  _Sunday, gorgeous._  
  
And Kurt messages back,  _Sunday. ♥_  
  
Blaine tears himself away from his dirty fanmail and the dirty-chic photograph and keeps delving into Kurt's backlog, clicking around at random and distracting himself back to a manageable level of physical interest. There's Taylor Lautner. There's some obscenely delicious-looking cheesecake. And there's a video:  
  
_They met on Tumblr, and the one girl flew in to meet her girlfriend._  
  
Blaine clicks play almost as if he's hypnotized. He's lost count of how many times he watched this video back when Kurt first posted it, because it really is just about perfect, and he didn't think it could get any better but it  _has_ , of course it has. "You are shaking," he mouths along with the girl in the airport. "You're making me shake!"  
  
He reblogs it, and adds just a heart in the comments.  
  
Kurt reblogs it back from him, and adds three more.

  
  
**VII. #kurtrageous**  
  
(When Kurt lands at 5:22 on Sunday evening, and comes out of the gate and literally throws everything he's holding onto the ground and grabs Blaine by the shoulders and kisses and kisses and  _kisses_  him, Blaine is shaking, too. He's shaking, and he kind of doesn't think he'll ever stop.)

 

 

_(fin)_


End file.
